Deep down, the West no longer has the morale of its morality, the valour of its values…
- Regis Debray
economic inequality
Harper's discreet class war against working people
The willingness of much of the Canadian media to go along with the Conservative narrative about Stephen Harper's "moderation" has allowed the prime minister to wage a discreet class war against working people without attracting too much attention.
Canadians don't like Harper's anti-worker agenda -- when they notice it. That's why there's been such a public outcry since the temporary foreign worker program was exposed as a mechanism by which the Harper government has flooded the country with hundreds of thousands of cheap foreign workers, thereby suppressing Canadian wages in the interests of helping corporations.
Class, politics and the undifferentiated middle
The middle class must occupy a privileged position in Canadian politics. Appeals to middle-class voters are a part of every party platform.
The Harper Conservatives talk about hard-working Canadians. The NDP likes middle-class working families. Recently, Justin Trudeau made middle-class Canadians the centrepiece of his victorious campaign for the Liberal leadership.
In Cold War America, calling everyone middle class allowed academics to avoid class analysis with its social divisions along economic lines, and its Marxist origins. In Europe, not only did sociologists divide society into workers and employers, each group had several of its own political parties.
NDP abandon socialism just when it might start working for them
It's richly ironic that New Democrats, who laboured for years to shed the albatross of "socialism" so they could gambol like Liberals in the fields of electoral bliss, finally succeeded last weekend just when the word may no longer be cursed.